The first Jewish person I met was at the El Al desk at Gatwick airport. I was 14 years old. Until then, my life had consisted of a few years in the Derbyshire Dales, followed by 10 years looking out of my bedroom onto the slag heap of New Ollerton Colliery. My father was the Methodist minister in a Nottinghamshire community of gritty Geordies who had moved down in search of new coal. He was a Scot. My mother was Irish. There was one black family – the Charles family; one Gypsy family – the Taylors; one Chinese family – the Wongs. There were no other Asians. There were no Jews. It was not a hub of multiculturalism.

I went through school in the 1970s without learning about the Holocaust – not unusual at the time; then came our family holiday to see the "Holy Land". I remember seeing Jerusalem's Western Wall with its bobbing Jews in prayer shawls and wondering who these people were. If Jesus, the founder of the Christianity I was brought up to practise, had been one of them, why didn't I know what they were doing? I read theology at university. I wanted to know more. I unearthed two millennia of antisemitism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews from Britain, the Russian pogroms and the Holocaust. It had been a torrid couple of thousand years in which to be Jewish, or so it appeared.

In 1991, I found myself in Jerusalem with my younger brother, James. We were fresh-faced graduates visiting Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. Like most people, we considered the Holocaust a Jewish matter – something that Jews talk and think about, and represent to us. That day, we discovered that it was a tragedy for the Jews, but not a "Jewish problem" at all. Whatever had created the conditions in which the mass murder of European Jewry took place had happened as a result of West European "civilisation". Doctors, lawyers, civil servants, priests, teachers – they were all there, adding their names to the roll-call of man's inhumanity to man. James and I recoiled. We realised it could have been us.

Inspired, perhaps revulsed, in 1995, we opened Britain's first Holocaust Centre, right on the edge of the same Nottinghamshire coalfield. The UK's Jewish community had avoided such an enterprise. A few years later, we started Aegis, the crimes against humanity group which now also runs the Kigali Memorial Centre in Rwanda, and in London the Aegis crimes against humanity prevention thinktank. We believe that to teach about the Holocaust is to grapple with the ongoing issue of crimes against humanity – and there is only one humanity.

In my role as the Chair of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) I am incredulous at the continual suspicion that Holocaust Memorial Day is for the Jewish community. It is not, and never has been. When the Holocaust happened, the Nazis' assault was on the values of European civilisation as a whole. The Jews were principle victims of its genocidal race policies. Roma and Sinti, the disabled, homosexuals and other groups were victims too. My concern was never principally about victims, but rather the perpetrators and the bystanders. Holocaust Memorial Day does not exist to list those who suffered, but to ask why this happened, and what it can tell us about human nature. The HMD theme this year, "Stand up to Hatred", emphasises the role we all can play in tackling hate crime in our communities. National Socialism practised hate crime for 22 years – and look at its legacy.

If I have learned one thing on my journey into the causes and consequences of genocide, it is that genocide happens to specific groups, but has implications for us all. As Europeans we need to ground ourselves in the history of the Holocaust, and reflect on its implications. It is our problem after all. Then as human beings we need to apply the learning points to other genocides, and to the hatred that exists in our own communities. It is easy to look back. It is more difficult to look forward. It is even more difficult to look within.